Page 245 of Mile High Ruin

I pause behind a rusted metal table and listen. Outside, Sloane shifts. A small sound. Pain or effort, not fear.

I hate that I know the difference.

Iosef hears it too. His voice comes lower now, pleased. “She shouldn’t be standing. Seven months, perhaps more, after weeks of stress, too little sleep, too little food. You noticed all of that, yes?”

My hand tightens around the gun. “She’s not part of this.”

“She has been part of this from the beginning.”

“No,” I say. “You put her there.”

He laughs softly. “I placed a few pieces. She moved beautifully on her own.”

I step out and fire toward the sound of his voice. He answers from a different place, and the bullet passes near my ribs before burying itself in the wall behind me.

Too close.

He’s moving through the inner row, using the columns better than I expected. I cross into the next aisle before he can trap me against the open floor, and for one second I see him through the gap between two machines.

We fire at the same time. His bullet tears through fabric at my side and burns a line across my skin. Mine hits his upper arm.

His gun drops from his hand and clatters across the floor. I move before he can reach it, but he doesn’t go for the gun.

He goes for the knife at his belt instead.

I catch his wrist with my left hand and slam it against the side of a steel frame. Once. Twice. On the third strike, something gives beneath my grip and his fingers open. The knife falls.

I drive my fist into his stomach. He folds, but he’s not helpless. His other hand goes for my throat, and he tries to use his weight to drag me sideways, toward a jagged length of torn metal sticking from the machinery behind me.

I let him think it works. Then I turn with him and put him into it instead. He hits the frame shoulder-first and makes a sound that is almost a scream.

But even an injured animal lashes out.

His knee comes up into my injured side, and pain tears through me hard enough to loosen my grip. He twists away, going not for the fallen gun across the floor but for the small pistol strapped at his ankle.

I catch his wrist too late to stop him from getting his fingers around it.

He drags the weapon up with shaking hands, and this time he doesn’t aim at me.

He aims past me. Toward the entrance.

Toward Sloane.

There’s no more talking. I break his wrist against the column, and the pistol drops. He gasps, eyes wide now, finally afraid because he understands he has reached the end of what cleverness can buy.

I shove my gun beneath his jaw.

“Vadim,” he chokes. “If you kill me, you may never know who else helped.”

I look at him. For eleven years, this man sat beside me and smiled quietly while he measured the places to cut. He used Camille’s fear, Petrov’s grief, Sloane’s innocence, Mila’s trauma, and my love, and even now he thinks information makes him valuable enough to spare.

“No,” I say. “I will find them without you.”

Then I pull the trigger.

His body jerks once, and then it’s done.

For a few seconds, I stand over him, breathing hard, blood soaking into my shirt at my side, the warehouse ringing with the echo of the shot.